TL;DR: I got demotivated from iOS development, and moved to web development instead, new blog at https://rubyyagi.com .
I have been writing on this iOS development blog for 2.5 years (start of 2018 until mid of 2020), wrote 80+ articles and 52 Xcode tips in email! Thank you for reading this blog!
I started this blog after failing a job interview for an iOS developer position for a popular messaging app company, I was burnt out at previous iOS dev job and was thinking alternative way to make money aside from full time job.
I then came across 30x500 course by Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman (not affiliated, I just enrolled for their course), which taught about how to create products that people wants, by studying audiences behavior, helping them in public, and creating a product that addresses their pains. I was an iOS developer, so naturally I chose the audience of iOS developers as I might have more insight on the same field.
I had a few small iOS apps making coffee money (like few bucks a week, which is just enough to cover annual Apple developer fees) before starting this blog, and I wanted to give it a try on making product for iOS devs (as myself was an iOS dev). So I started writing articles and tutorials for iOS development stuff, helped answer question in iOS Dev Slack, StackOverflow and Reddit occassionally. I put a newsletter box below every post I wrote, and slowly more and more people subscribed to my newsletter, and it grew to 2500+ subscribers at current time of writing!
After writing a dozens of articles, I noticed a few common reoccuring pain points appearing in iOS dev subreddit and Slack, which revolve around not understanding how Auto Layout works, how Swift optionals work (the ?, ! was confusing to me at first too) and how to implement Sign in with Apple. I then wrote a book on these topics, and tried to market them to my newsletter subscribers, the sales was OK (wouldn't say its life changing, I still have a job lol).
As of today I have earned a total of $5,452 from all of my ebooks, in a span of two years since I first started selling my first book on Auto Layout. I have never made that much money from product income in my life, my apps was making a few hundred dollars a year at best, I have learned a ton on technical writing , marketing and most importantly understanding audience's pain (sounds like a cliche, I know).
I have also learned a lot more on iOS development by writing articles, my previous job mostly was to print JSON prettily using UIKit and I didn't get much exposure to other framework like CoreLocation, automated testing etc. In order to write about these topics, I had to do research on them and made a lot of demo apps to learn about them before writing article.
I have made friends with other iOS/macOS developers on Twitter, gotten offer to guest blog (Smashing Magazine, Bitrise) , and even gotten a few adhoc paid task from other iOS devs! All these wouldn't have happened without this blog, I am forever grateful for this.
Truth to be told, I was working as a Ruby/ Web developer while I was writing these iOS articles, and it's hard to churn out iOS articles regularly when you don't have frequent real life iOS development experiences.
I got demotivated slowly and eventually Apple introduced SwiftUI, which gotten a lot of attention of iOS devs. I can feel that people are slowly moving from UIKit to SwiftUI, it was a big shift in programming paradigm and at this point I lost interest on writing about iOS development.
I have since decided to switch from writing about iOS development to web development (mainly using Ruby and the framework Ruby on Rails) , if you are interested to follow along, you can check out https://rubyyagi.com , I would not update this blog anymore but I will keep it as is for archival purpose.
Thanks for reading and supporting this blog for the past 2 years!
Here's my books if you are interested :
